Darren Conway

I am a teacher, a husband, a father of four and a football fan (Man U, Sydney, Australia and Ireland). TTP!

[Darren Conway @DJConway83]

@Gatty54 We might lose Cleary to rugby now. What else is left?

[Craig Foster @Craig_Foster]

Playing the Trump Card.

Under Infantino, there’s no longer such thing as an ‘independent FIFA Committee.’

There is only the ‘FIFA Committees for the protection of image, promotion of autocrats and any and all regimes with money to fill FIFA pockets, and the capitulation to power irrespective of the damage to what’s left of its Statutes or the integrity of the game.’

Trump proudly proclaims how he influenced the unprecedented decision during a World Cup.

What an embarrassment for football.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Tyler Parker @tylrparkr]

“That was pure athleticism. He went right over the top of Williams.”

I don’t know, Reg. I think the fact that Wemby’s 7’6” and Williams is 6’9” may have had something to do with it.

[Rilwan @Real1_balogun]

One of those 16 slots has gone to a country that failed to win a single game during normal qualifying.

There are African teams who won four games in their groups and they haven't made it to the World Cup.

Burkina Faso won 6 of their 10 games, and lost only one. No World Cup. Cameroon won 5 of their 10 and lost 1, they'll be watching from home. Gabon won 8 of their 10 games. A staggering 80% of their games and they are not going to the World Cup. They lost only one.

One can even argue that Madagascar are more deserving of a place in the World Cup than Sweden because they won 60% of their qualifying games.

If you prune it down to the mathematics of it, the 4 semi-finalists at the last World Cup comprised 2 European countries.

That's 15% of the European countries who were there — 13. Africa had one semi-finalist out of the five representatives there. That's a 20% success rate in the semis for Africa.

None of both continents won the World Cup.

This is what a convenient analysis looks like. And that's what you're doing.

Europe has a third of the World Cup slots. There are 5 confederations sharing the other thirty-two slots but Europe believes it's not enough.

You call it ‘mere’ 16 places. They say it's unfair yet everything else says otherwise.

UEFA should have 24 slots while the rest of the world can share the rest? That's not ‘fair’ representation.

Europe has ‘just’ 16 of 55. Africa has ‘just’ 10 (read 9+1) of its 54. None of the European countries had to travel several miles to play an intercontinental fixture.

The point on home advantage lends to logic. Neutrality would have been better in their selection of venues but on those countries calling for more slots when they have one-third already, it's everything but fair.

My name is Rilwan, I love and write about football systems, memories and the depths behind the game. Follow me and repost if you want more of this.

[Darren Conway @DJConway83]

@SpikeEskin @badguy974 In America maybe? Growing pretty strong around the world

[Darren Conway @DJConway83]

@gotclippd @DannyBKelly

[Caroline Cummings @CaroRCummings]

Statements from Colin and Sophie Hortman, children of Mark and Melissa Hortman, after President Trump reposted false claims about their parents’ death.

“I ask President Trump to please consider the pain and sadness we have faced,” Sophie said, asking him to remove it.

[Darren Conway @DJConway83]

@SpikeEskin Listen to Middle Kids. Sound nothing like them but remind me of them - Dave sings on one of their songs as well.

[Mike O'Connor @MOConnor_NBA]

It shouldn't be glossed over that Maxey showed up to media day and said we're setting a new standard for effort and mentality with this team, and actually brought it to fruition. Real leadership. Not a lot of guys that can pull that off

Special kid. We are so lucky to have him.

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

Who pays and who receives in the US? The map shows the balance of payments between the states and the federal government. Green states pay more money to the Feds than they receive back in return. Source: https://t.co/ohEjaVqZ8B

[James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki]

This was not what was just revealed. What the FBI said was that it had 275 agents at the Capitol in response to the riot, not that it had 275 agents in the crowd before the riot began. But MAGA has now totally swallowed this lie, and Trump will repeat it from now until forever.

[Clue Heywood @ClueHeywood]

Most of Trump’s lies are abhorrent but I’d forgotten how funny the “annual physical” ones were. Yeah man, 6’3”, 224lbs. About the same stats as DK Metcalf here. Got it.

[Darren Conway @DJConway83]

@SpikeEskin PG has been rough. Some shocking play by Joe in the third.

[Daniel Pink @DanielPink]

Many parents believe that teaching kids the world is dangerous 🌍🚨 prepares them for life.

The research says otherwise. 📚❌ Those beliefs predicted less success, lower satisfaction, and worse health.

Teaching kids the world is bad doesn’t prepare them—it stifles them. 🚫🌱

[internet hall of fame @InternetH0F]

Before passing away to illness, his best friend recorded his best man speech to be apart of their big day

[Mo @MJEagle23]

Billy Slater, being angry
& Privately whinging and complaining about teams taking out the big name stars...

[Teddy @DuchampEdward]

The dirtiest player to ever step on a footy field gets away with yet another one. Not even a penalty blown. Grub #NRLRoostersCowboys

[Josh Reynolds @JoshReynolds24]

The refs called this a kick ball… THE REFS CALLED THIS A KICK BALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[David Thomas @dmthomas90]

New study from Norway: Banning smartphones in schools significantly decreases the proportion of girls presenting with mental health issues and bullying drops dramatically. Benefits most strongly felt by disadvantaged girls.

https://t.co/uQRp7hW8aH